Spotlight
Professor Zakes Mda’s “Sometimes There Is a Void”
The English department is proud to recognize the publication of Professor Zakes Mda's Sometimes There Is a Void. His memoir has gained critical acclaim from critics like Rob Nixon of The New York Timesand John Freeman of The Boston Globe, as well as Alexandra Fuller, author of Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.
Rob Nixon says of the memoir, “Mda’s greatest gift is his Dickensian social range, his ability to generate characters from diverse backgrounds, colluding and colliding across the barriers erected to divide them."
Zakes Mda is a professor of creative writing here at Ohio University. He has also been a visiting professor at both Yale and the University of Vermont. Among his novels, The Heart of Redness (FSG, 2002) won the Richard Wright Zora Neale Hurston Legacy Award. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Athens, Ohio.
The Department of English
Our department includes faculty distributed among four program areas: Literary Studies, Creative Writing, Composition and Rhetoric, and English Education. We offer doctoral degrees in literary studies, creative writing, and composition/rhetoric, and a master’s degree in English, serving approximately sixty graduate students in any given year. On the undergraduate level, we serve close to six hundred undergraduate majors, including almost two hundred integrated language arts majors enrolled in the College of Education.
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News
Acclaimed Poet Adrienne Su Visits Ohio University
The English Department is pleased to announce a reading by Visiting Poet, Adrienne Su, author of numerous books of poems such as Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997) and Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009). The reading will take place Thursday, Feb. 16th, at 7:30, in Baker Center Theater. This is a great opportunity to hear some incredible poetry. read more >>
Dr. Jennie Nelson Pioneers Undergraduate Writing Certificate
Professor Jennie Nelson has created a new certificate program that will give students of nearly all majors the chance to graduate with distinction. The Writing Certificate is this first of its kind in Ohio, and provides students the opportunity to further develop their writing skills while also providing documented proof of the effort they put forth. read more >>
David Wanczyk’s “The Birthplace of the Tomato”
David Wanczyk, Director of Special Programs, investigates the surprising origins of the modern tomato in his featured documentary, "The Birthplace of the Tomato," on the Web site of Alimentum: The Literature of Food. read more >>
Student News
Dogwood Bloom with Garrison Gondek, Sarah Green, and Jim Nelson
Fiction writers Garrison Gondek and Jim Nelson, along with poet Sarah Green read their works as part of the Dogwood Bloom Reading Series, Winter reading. read more >>
“Cripping Our Classrooms: Disability Studies and Composition Pedagogy”
Ph.D. candidate Sarah Einstein will give a presentation titled "Cripping Our Classrooms: Disability Studies and Composition Pedagogy." The presentation will take place on Friday, February 17th at 10am-11am in Room 319, Alden Library. read more >>